Eric Hand

Eric’s first journalistic forays were as an arts critic, covering film and music for the Stanford Daily; his first feature was about artists-in-residence at the San Francisco dump.

The smell of journalism was enticing. He went on to write for the Oregonian, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, where his reporting ranged from Scrabble subcultures to methamphetamine-induced crime in the Ozarks. In 2007, he joined Nature to cover the fruits of astronomers’ skyward glances. His concerns shifted below ground in 2014, when he became the Earth and planetary science reporter at Science. In 2016, he became Science’s deputy news editor for physical sciences.

He studied civil engineering at Princeton University and later picked up master’s degrees in geography and geophysics from the University of Cambridge and Stanford University. In 2010, he was a Knight science journalism fellow at MIT.